Richelle D. Schrock

Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies

Education

B.A., Miami University M.A., Ph.D., The Ohio State University

About

Richelle Schrock, the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, came to Ohio Wesleyan in the Fall of 2008 and has quickly become a very active and involved member of the campus and community. Schrock says she has been “impressed with our students and their interest in social justice issues.” She has been able to connect to the campus passion for community service and has brought this focus into the classroom.

Schrock’s research interests include Global Feminisms and Feminist Ethnography, and she is particularly interested in how women work together across cultural divides for social change. Schrock taught a Sagan Course last spring called Gender and Immigrant Experience in which the class took on the responsibility of helping to resettle a Somali refugee family that had just moved to Columbus after living in a refugee camp in Kenya for almost twenty years.

The students in Dr. Schrock’s course collected all of the material goods the family would need for the first few months of their lives in the United States. Through the course, Schrock was able to combine her research interests with teaching. “My dissertation research focused on the Somali community in Columbus, so this was an excellent opportunity both for me and for the students. The Somali community is almost entirely Muslim, so the course helped students to examine the complexities of Muslim American identity in the post-9/11 era.”

She has presented her work at several professional conferences and remains active with the Somali community in Columbus. She received a Coca-Cola grant for women to pursue her dissertation research and is currently at work on revising chapters of her dissertation for publication.